Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (30 page)

For a while, my father used his truck to haul topsoil for landscapers who were trying to cover up the scars of the construction at the end of the causeway, especially around the new tourist information bureau. The little bulldozer he bought for the lumber camp in Troy was getting rusty, over beside the barn.

Whatever hope there was for him, and the hundreds of former ferry workers thrown out of jobs by the causeway, had been dashed earlier in the year by a story in the Halifax newspaper. The American company that had been considering building a pulp mill in the area had decided against it.

The politicians were still optimistic. The new mayor of Port Hawkesbury, Mr. Gillis, was saying that prosperity was inevitable. New industry would come, he said, if for no other reason than that the hydrogen bomb was forcing big industrialists to decentralize their operations, moving factories away from vulnerable places in the midwestern United States and central Canada to remoter places like the Strait of Canso.

People just rolled their eyes.

We had to be patient, he said. But Mayor O’Neill from Mulgrave, where, the older boys were saying, “things are flatter than piss on a platter,” was beginning to lose patience with politicians in Halifax and Ottawa. His comments were becoming more critical, perhaps because he’s Irish. My father isn’t Irish, but he seemed to be more on the wavelength of Mayor O’Neill than Mayor Gillis.

But then he’d sing his little ditty, “Sounds like
bullshit
…to me”—which was to say, “I don’t really have any faith in any of them.”

And even when my mother would be tacking on extra prayers at the end of the rosary just to nudge along the prospects for some of what the politicians are calling “industrial development,” you’d still hear him tapping his foot on the floor.

“Just move along” is what the tapping foot would be saying.

Then one morning when I was in the barn to feed the cow, I noticed that the canvas duffel bag in which he kept the mining gear was no longer where I’d been seeing it since the summer of 1953.

All fall there was great excitement in our house—at least among the women. There were unmistakable signs that there would be a provincial election at any time. And this time there was little doubt: the Tories were going to win.

The Grits had, for reasons best known to themselves, picked Dr. Henry Hicks, who was a university professor, to lead their party. Dr. Hicks, everybody said, was extremely intelligent. He had been a Rhodes Scholar at the famous university in Oxford, England. But he didn’t look like a politician. He looked more like a banker. He wasn’t very tall, and he lacked the military elegance of Angus L. He had squinty eyes and bad hair and an unpleasant little mustache. He used fancy words, and his voice had a pompous edge on it.

The women at our place were delighted. They’d been worried that the Grits would pick the man Angus L. wanted to take his place—a man named Harold Connolly. Mr. Connolly had a lot of political experience and a pleasing public style. He had a friendly appearance and a sense of humour. More frightening to the women at our place was that he was of Irish descent and Roman Catholic. All that made him extremely attractive and difficult to dislike. He could probably defeat the new Tory leader, a man named Robert Stanfield, whose family had made a fortune manufacturing and selling underwear—an impressive man, but kind of dry.

Now they say that Mr. Stanfield can’t lose because the Tories did what the Grits were too confused to do. They picked the resurrection of the great Angus L. Macdonald to lead their party. Mr. Stanfield is
everything that Angus L. was—except a Catholic and a Cape Bretoner. The fact that he’s a Protestant is fine because it wouldn’t really be fair to have two Catholic premiers in a row anyway. Mr. Stanfield is a mainlander—but that doesn’t matter so much anymore, now that there’s the causeway—and he’s wealthy, but, in spite of that, he’s as honest as the day is long. Just like Angus L.

Grandma Donohue and my Aunt Veronica were quite convinced that the Tories would be in power before Christmas, and if that should happen, someone with my father’s Tory background shouldn’t have any problem getting work.

What Tory background? my father would ask.

Sure your mother and father and all your relatives are Tories. And isn’t Ronnie (what we call my Aunt Veronica) working day and night for the Tory candidates, Al Davis and Archie Neil Chisholm?

And, in any case, once the Tories are in power, we’ll see the good times roll.

My father never argued with the women. I never heard him discuss politics. But if I were he, here’s what I’d be saying.

Good times? Haven’t we just had four years of good times? Haven’t they just spent about thirty million dollars on a new causeway and canal and practically demolished the village for new roads and railways? Haven’t we been hearing them talk about new industry here for the whole time? And what’s the latest? The American company that was the best bet for creating new jobs here has changed its mind.

Good times are for other people, other places. And, when all is said and done, how much can we really expect from “good times” in the long run? As the old politician in PEI used to say, good times won’t put another tit on the cow.

What they weren’t saying was what everybody knows and doesn’t have to say. Liberals were going to be booted out of jobs all over the place after a change in government, and that they would rapidly be
replaced by good strong Conservatives. Liquor store people and highway workers, including the snowplough drivers and road foremen, would be fired—even the forest rangers. Tories are lining up to take their jobs. A Tory with a truck would be sitting pretty with all the roadwork planned, and especially the new Trans-Canada Highway.

And that was something else. Who could say when that job would start or where the road would go?

My father was never interested in any of the political talk. He disapproves of people losing their jobs just because of how they vote. He says he’d rather starve than take a political job.

But it isn’t just how people voted, the women say. People can vote however they want, but they should keep their mouths shut about it. Also, the Liberals didn’t hesitate when they were shoving the poor Tories out of their jobs, when the shoe was on the other foot.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword, they say.

The old man would just sit there, smiling, the way his father smiles when there’s no choice but to agree or keep quiet.

It’s the same on the mountain. My understanding of Gaelic is flimsy, but I could understand practically everything Grandma Peigeag was talking about when the conversation turned to politics. You’d think the Lord Himself had come back to run the province the way she crowed about Mr. Stanfield.

What is it about women? I wonder. What is it that makes them more pragmatic than the men? Or is it only here, where the women become tougher than the men because the men so often have to go away?

And then, one day, the duffel bag was gone from the barn altogether.

Delivering the newspapers was becoming less interesting by the day—mostly a matter of dropping them on doorsteps or, if there was
someone home, placing them wordlessly in a hand extended past a storm door. Of course, there were exceptions. The old Fox brothers, who were bachelors and lived alone, always insisted I come in to chat, and sometimes they’d make tea. Lennie MacDonald, who is from town, was the timekeeper at the Gorman project and one of a handful of people still working in the offices there. He always liked to sit back and shoot the breeze when I showed up with his paper. But a lot of my old friends were gone. On the dredge and the tugboat, they were pushing hard to finish the project—there was another big one waiting somewhere on the St. Lawrence River. They didn’t have as much time for talking or reading newspapers.

The Gorman construction camps themselves were practically deserted, adding to the strange feeling that grew stronger inside me every time I went there after what happened to Old John. I wanted them to be gone forever. I wanted the place to grow up in trees, and for time to erase everything that had been there and had happened there.

For days afterward, there was a dark place in the gravel just in front of the doorstep where I last saw him.

The first time I saw that stain, on the day of his funeral, which was two days after the Saturday I saw him sitting there, it startled me. Then I realized that I didn’t want to think he’d been dead and that it had been important for me to believe he had been alive when I spoke to him. It sounds stupid now admitting that I convinced myself he was alive. But there had been no doubt in my mind at the time. He couldn’t have been dead. Surely I’d have known he was dead. Surely I’m not such an idiot that I could step over a dead body and talk to it
twice
and carry on as if everything was normal. You’d have to be a complete moron not to recognize a corpse.

That Saturday night and Sunday at Mass and at the funeral, I kept telling myself that I had been the last person to see him alive.
It surely happened after I was gone. But looking at that stain on the ground in front of the staff house, I realized that this deception wasn’t any comfort at all. Pretending he was alive and not a corpse when I went by only raised the disturbing possibility that I should have done something to distract him or maybe even help him. That maybe, if I had reacted to the rifle, for example, I’d have interrupted his plan. Maybe if I had asked what I always asked, how things were in Hungary, that would have got him talking—and everybody knows that talking is one of the sure cures for despair. Now I’m questioning myself. And I’m quickly realizing how easy it is to get into the muck of asking questions that have no answers, the worst of which always begin with the words “What if…?” And I’d say, “What if nothing” in reply.

Then I’d see that brownish patch on the gravel again.

On the Monday it looked as if maybe somebody had spilled motor oil. But you never see flies crawling over a spot of motor oil. And it was right about where his face would have been when I walked by.

And I’d find myself just standing there staring at it, my brain flooding with strange thoughts and questions. And realizing how little separates the living from the dead—a bit of fluid passing through tissue.

And then the real questions. When did he do it? Just as I was pedalling down the road? I know that a .22 doesn’t make a very loud noise. And why did he do it? How can somebody become that desperate?

He had a job. He had a place to live. He had friends. He had all the food he could eat. You could tell by the quick way he moved and how easily he’d bend to pick something up and by the colour of his skin that he was healthy for an old man of sixty-two.

Could it be that living far away from your family, and losing any hope of ever seeing them again, can cause such desperation?

That Monday, after staring at the dark spot on the gravel for a while, I kicked at it, but when the gravel scattered I could see the
stain was still there, imprinted on the hard earth below the gravel. And there it stayed for as long as I continued delivering newspapers to the camp.

Or did I just imagine it?

But then the camps were finally empty, and there was no longer any need for me to go there. And the stain became a part of that hard place beneath the gravel of memory.

The first clue that things were bad came one day when my father called me over to the truck. He’d just arrived home for supper and had obviously stopped for the mail on the way. He had some envelopes in his hand. He held one up.

“Look at this,” he said.

“Who is it from?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

But obviously it did. He instructed me that anytime I pick up the mail, any letter that looks like the one in his hand was not to go in the house.

“Right?”

“Right.”

“You put it here instead,” he said, opening the truck door and indicating the space behind the driver’s seat.

“Okay,” I said.

“Look at the envelope again,” he said.

I complied.

“What do you see?”

“A letter with a window in it.”

“Very good. A letter with a window. What do you do with it?”

“I put it in the truck.”

“That’s the boy.”

In the weeks ahead, there would be a lot of letters with little windows.

School can become a welcome distraction from reality. There was no more daydreaming with my mother at the front of the classroom. Even Neil MacIver settled down. Occasionally he’d put on a brief show when he sensed that her mood was appropriate. And, usually, she’d laugh along with everybody else—for about a minute. Then the tone of voice would change and we’d be back to business.

Being alone in grade nine, I often found the line between home and school significantly blurred. On days when there was a lot to do with the other grades, she’d leave my schoolwork for when we were home. That was particularly true for Latin and algebra, two subjects she seems to consider the keys to all success in life. I’m not sure what they’re good for. We all know Latin is a dead language, outside the church. I can see the value of arithmetic. But algebra is just a series of puzzles. They can be fun if you’re in the mood, and there is a definite feeling of accomplishment when I’ve translated a Latin story and finally figured it out, or after I’ve successfully finished a page of algebra problems. But the long-term value of these exercises remains a mystery to me. I understand why we should know subjects like English and history. I realize you never have the feeling of having arrived at a conclusion. The process is endless, and I can see how people spend their entire lives studying history and literature, and growing more uncertain as they go along, and finally ending up completely in the dark.

The stories in history and literature are all about human behaviour, which is impossible to understand no matter how much we know. That much I know from reading the newspapers that I drag around the village every day. But even though you never fully understand them, the
stories in the newspapers and the history and the literature all have a particular shape, and the more you read and study and observe, the more similarities you recognize in what has happened before and is happening now, in what is real and what is imaginary.